{"id":7317,"date":"2020-01-07T11:02:16","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T08:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=7317"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:46","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:46","slug":"energy-land-and-law-this-year-its-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2020\/01\/07\/energy-land-and-law-this-year-its-personal\/","title":{"rendered":"Energy, Land and Law: This Year, It\u2019s Personal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Kevin Bloom <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If history brings insight and insight brings clarity, 2020 must be the year humanity responds with effective action to the greatest threat it has ever faced. From Rockefeller\u2019s Standard Oil to Exxon Mobil and our own coal sector, the fossil fuel industry has consistently beaten the lawmakers \u2014 now our world is on fire. But with rich nations like Australia suddenly on the climate frontlines, the courts may be ready to push back. For South Africans, who\u2019ll be directly affected by a raft of climate-related cases set down for 2020, the outcome couldn\u2019t be more personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. Fuel for the fire<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLaws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two centuries back, when the French novelist Honore de Balzac wrote these words, the stakes were lower. The sixth mass extinction<\/a> was not yet a lived reality, the polar ice caps were not yet disappearing into the sea and Paris, Balzac\u2019s hometown, was not sweltering in 40\u00b0<\/strong>C summer heat. Anthropogenic carbon emissions, or what there were of them, came mostly from oil lamps, wood fires and coal stoves \u2014 James Watt\u2019s steam engine, although commercialised, was three decades away from ushering in the industrial age. The world may or may not have been a happier place, but it was more or less intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the late 1800s, around the time that Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius was calculating the connection between C02 emissions and the Earth\u2019s temperature \u2014 a doubling in greenhouse gas content, the Nobel laureate concluded<\/a>, would heat the planet by 5-6\u00b0<\/strong>C \u2014 the system was primed for the great unravelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because what was clear, even then, was that the law had been outgunned by the energy industry. The Standard Oil Company, the world\u2019s first major fossil fuel conglomerate, had eliminated the competition to seize control of 95% of US oil production, and the government was trying to break the company up. But founder John D Rockefeller had created a maze of holding structures and trusts, which rendered Standard Oil impervious<\/a> to public investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou could argue its existence from its effects,\u201d wrote Ida Tarbell in her celebrated history<\/a> of the conglomerate, \u201cbut you could not prove it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tarbell may have been familiar with Balzac\u2019s metaphor about spiders and flies. She had faced the commercial Machiavellianism of the Gilded Age head-on, when her father \u2014 a small oil producer \u2014 had refused Rockefeller\u2019s offer of a buy-out. Her personal experience of the consequences of that decision had gestated for 30 years, until she parlayed it into what Smithsonian<\/em> Magazine<\/em> termed<\/a> a \u201credefinition\u201d of investigative journalism: a 19-part series (and book) that unearthed the kickbacks, collusions and conspiracies upon which Rockefeller had built his empire. In the end, Tarbell\u2019s muckraking achieved what the US government, acting alone, could not \u2014 by the time she was done, Standard Oil was no more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward 120 years, past the short-lived hiatus of the Progressive Era<\/a> (when, thanks in no small part to Tarbell, social and political reform held out for once against Big Money), and Balzac\u2019s metaphor was back with a vengeance. In late October 2019, Exxon Mobil found itself in the New York State Supreme Court, on charges<\/a> of lying to its shareholders about the potential future costs of the climate crisis. On its merits, the case was sound, with the state prosecutor leaning on the ground-breaking work<\/a> of journalists to argue that \u201cthe company failed to manage the risks in the way it promised.\u201d But the judge, who refused<\/a> to recuse himself after it was revealed that he held $250,000 in Exxon stock, dismissed the case on 10 December 2019, ruling<\/a> that there was \u201cno proof\u201d the company had duped investors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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